As parents, we all run into the occasional night where are toddlers or kids resist bedtime.

They just don’t want to go to sleep, and even if we have a routine established, they put up a fuss. If you had a bad day and are short tempered, you can easily let it turn into a fight with your kids. If you are more relaxed about it and flexible with your thinking, you can often just turn the situation around before it ever evolves into something difficult.

Remember that kids just want to do things that they deem fun, comforting, or somehow satisfying. As a parent, if you get resistance from your child, you can turn that into co-operation if you transform what you are doing into something that is more fun, more comforting, or more satisfying.

Here’s a recent example. My oldest daughter was watching Berstein Bears in our bedroom during “quiet time” before bed. My wife had already taken my youngest daughter off to brush teeth and cuddle, and I was giving my older daughter another 15 minutes. When the cartoon ended, I told her it was time for bed, as usual. She put up a whiny fuss about it and I knew I had to change the direction of the situation right away, or I’d risk a tantrum. At the very least, it would just set the wrong tone for bedtime and it would take longer to get her settled.

What I did: I was standing at the edge of the bed telling her it was time for bed, and I had the remote in my hand to turn off the TV. If I simply turned it off, I risked killing our rapport and turning the whining into a big fight. So I playfully tossed the remote onto the mattress beside her. She knows how to hit the “off” button so I gave her a little challenge. I told her, “Ok sweetie … I’m going to give you a 20 second head start and then I’m going to crawl over to the TV and I’m going to turn it off. I wonder if you’ll beat me to it.”

I started (again, playfully) counting to 20. By the time I got to 4 she was into it and didn’t want to wait. She said, “Daddy – just go, start crawling.” I did exactly that. I got onto the floor and started creeping over to the TV like I was some kind of lion or tiger. I got halfway there when she turned the TV off and declared victory. I laughed, she laughed, and I carried her off to bed like the little princess that she is.

The whole “fuss” lasted all of 10 seconds. I didn’t negotiate with her or demand instant compliance with my wishes. That’s not the right way to handle it. It’s much easier, in my experience, to create a more compelling reason for her to want to go along with the routine. I just turned it into a game and that seemed more fun than a cartoon. I knew it would work (or at least I had a pretty good feeling it would) because we play games all the time. So I’m not telling you that this will work for you exactly as I’ve described it. Use your own instincts. But the same principles apply.

You can get more flies with honey than with vinegar … that’s what my Mom always used to tell me. Boy, was she smart.

Lots of parents wonder how to get their kids to transition from a crib to a toddler bed. It usually happens around the age of two, but sometimes a bit later.

I’m going to provide a series of tips to help you get your toddler adjusted to a bed rather than a crib. But before I do, let’s talk about why your toddler might resist this transition. It’s pretty simple. People tend to resist change. Once we are comfortable with something the way it is, we don’t like to change it. Toddler behavior tends to align with this basic rule of life.

Change will be accepted by a person when:

1. The new action / behavior is clearly superior;
2. The old behavior / action is unavailable and the new one is the best available option;
3. Change is forced upon them until it becomes a new habit.

Obviously option #1 is the best approach to use with children because it creates no disruption. It’s like offering a child a chocolate cookie for dessert instead of a stick of celery. They will go for it instantly with no hesitation. To get a toddler into a toddler bed, your goal should be to associate lots of positive attributes to the bed.

In the case of switching to a toddler bed, Options 2 and 3 on the above list are essentially the same. You are taking away choice (i.e. you are taking away the crib) and the next best solution is the toddler bed. Specifically, you are taking away the crib without getting agreement from your child. This can cause your child to be upset, but eventually he or she will get over it and the toddler bed becomes a new pattern.

So how can parents get toddlers to willingly switch to a toddler bed? Here are a bunch of ideas for you to try out:

• Go shopping with your toddler. If you can get him to pick out his own bed, chances are that he will pick something he likes (people rarely pick stuff that they hate, right?). This will immediately boost your chances of getting your toddler to actually enjoy sleeping in the toddler bed.
• Setup the toddler bed in your child’s room. Leave it there for a week or more before you take away the crib. If space is an issue, maybe this isn’t something you can do, but if you put the bed there, the child will start to see it as normal. Just introduce it as another piece of furniture and perhaps don’t even mention that you’ll be taking the crib away. If you get huge resistance and are unable to get your child to willingly change to the new bed, you may just have to remove the crib by surprise.
• Play quiet games on the new bed with your toddler. Those toddler wooden puzzles and shape matching games are great things to do on the new bed together. Read books together. Snuggle together and tickle your toddler into laughter. This will ‘anchor’ positive feelings to the new bed very quickly. Anchoring is something I teach in my Talking to Toddlers Audio Course, which all parents should consider for dealing with difficult toddlers.
• Actually tell your toddler that they have a choice as to where they will sleep at night (or at nap time). Then make the bed appealing by offering a “big boy/girl pillow” for when they are in the new bed. Or simply create a reward scenario where the toddler gets stickers for having a nap in the new bed. At this point it should be offered as a choice, not a forced issue. You want to get your toddler to decide, on his or her own, to sleep in this new bed.

If these tricks still don’t work, then you have to resort to taking away the option of a crib altogether. But remember – you don’t need to rush this! You might bring on a screaming fit if your child suddenly finds his crib gone, and a toddler bed in its place. That’s why I think introducing the bed by the crib side makes for an easier transition.

When and if you have to take away the crib, I highly recommend the “it’s broken” excuse. With our first daughter, we were not only moving her into a big girl bed, but also into a new bedroom! We told her the crib was broken. We took the mattress out and put it on the floor of her new room beside her new bed. We let her choose where to sleep. She picked the mattress on the floor, but was curious about the new bed. We let her play on the new bed and lie down on it if she felt like it. We read books together on the new bed. Whenever she asked about her crib we told her it was broken. No arguments.

Within 2 weeks she was sleeping in her new bed. The clincher was this: we took her to the pet store and showed her all of the fish. We bought a small aquarium kit with some pretty (but cheap) tropical fish. We placed the aquarium on her dresser, which could only be seen if she lied in her new bed, not from the mattress on the floor. We cuddled on the new bed at night with the aquarium light on. She loved watching the fish as she fell asleep. It worked perfectly.

If you want to be able to understand how to solve these kinds of problems, check out the Talking To Toddlers Audio Course.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson

Based on my research, one of the most common problems parents face is that their toddler doesn’t want to go to bed. I’d like to explore this problem and discuss ways that you can solve it more or less permanently. I say “more or less” because patterns that you get your child into will always be in flux, but once you get the pattern installed, it’s just like driving. All you need to do is keep your eye on the road and adjust the steering wheel when needed.

When toddlers don’t want to go to bed it is usually for one of a few simple reasons. Either they think they are missing out on the fun that happens when they sleep, or they are somehow scared of their bedroom, or of the dark.
In this post, we’ll tackle only the first scenario. This is, in my experience, the most common. Kids are simply having too much fun and they don’t want it to end. If you were to ask (or give them the option), they’d tell you they want to stay up all night. They just don’t know any better, and it’s kinda cute if you ask me.

So how do you deal with this? You need to establish bedtime as something that is also fun. In fact, if you can make sure that bedtime is actually more fun than whatever else is going on, you’ll have even better success.

Here are 5 quick tips you can use to make bedtime more fun and less of a fight:

1. Make the process of going to bed into a game. With my monkey-girl, we regularly get her to “go hide” under her sheets, and then we pretend we can’t find her for a minute or two. She lies there giggling, just waiting for us to find her. It is so cute and she loves it.
2. Do an activity together. Reading books, telling stories, or playing make-believe are all great. My daughter loves french toast, and we’ll often lie in her bed together pretending to make french toast with an imaginary frying pan, imaginary toast, eggs, etc. Then she eats it up and we kiss goodnight.
3. Talk about fun things. Get your toddler in the habit of looking forward to tomorrow. Talk about what will be fun to do tomorrow. Especially when the kindergarten years approach, looking forward to school will be important to establishing a pattern of really enjoying learning.
4. Get good at using your soothing voice when you’re tucking your child into bed. For most parents this is already automatic, but if you are in the habit of tucking in your toddler using your normal daytime voice, change this immediately. You want your night time voice to condition a night-time response from your child.
5. Recognize that patterns will change with time. Once you get your child into the habit of enjoying the bedtime ritual, you are in great shape. But the actual specifics of the ritual will (and should) change over time. Story books and activities change. What we talk about changes. The games we play to get into bed vary. Change is the only constant in life, and this is even more true with kids!

Next post we’ll talk about what you can do if your child is scared of bedtime for whatever reason. Until then, enjoy your children. If you enjoyed this post, then you’ll love my parenting audio book.

Chris Thompson